The Microsoft Excel Link to EVE Online in Closed Beta

At times I do tire of the “spreadsheets in space” moniker that gets hung on EVE Online, usually by people who have never undocked a ship in the game.  There are, for example, no spreadsheets in the picture below.  It is just sweet, sweet spaceship explosions.

All the calculations must be hidden I guess

That said, Microsoft Excel is a useful tool and EVE Online does give us an almost unprecedented about of data through their APIs and through things like the Monthly Economic Report.  So while I haven’t used Excel for any internet spaceship business lately, it isn’t like I haven’t built my own spreadsheets in the past.

EVE Online is a video game where both the devs and the players use spreadsheets.

So it wasn’t a completely laughable moment when CCP announced that they were working with Microsoft on an integration with Excel.  In addition, CCP are no strangers to Microsoft, running their game on MS SQL Server as its database.

Perhaps the only surprising bit is that we’re almost nine months down the road since CCP announced the integration at FanFest and we’re only just now hearing some news about it.

CCP used to announce something and release it a month later.  They used to make Blizzard look laughable awkward as they would declare and expansion and deliver on it with a year’s wind up.  But CCP is trying to get back into that “two expansions a year” groove again that hearkens back to the old days, so perhaps I should cut them a bit of slack… because at least we’ve finally hears something.

The Microsoft Excel integration is going into closed beta.

Spreadsheets in Space for Real

They didn’t tell us a lot about what they have for the closed beta, but it was interesting enough that I signed up for it.  I figure I used Excel at work every day, as well as some other data tools, I might qualify.  I am equally bad at Excel and EVE Online, so why not?

If you want to join in as well you can apply for the closed beta at the dev blog linked above.